With the enormous development in the field of computer network and mobile technologies, people are able to access their applications, resources and services with cloud appliances via the Internet. In the hosted private cloud (HPC) market, several cloud appliances can be deployed, managed and monitored by a hosting service provider. The multi-tenant private cloud appliances may be deployed to different virtual local area networks (VLANs) for consideration of security and network management since the different VLANs are separate and independent. As a result, in the VLAN environment, each client can only control his cloud appliance via a center appliance in the same VLAN.
However, due to this restriction of the VLAN configuration, the cloud appliances in different VLAN could not be served and managed by the same management server. For example, the cloud appliances can only get their internet protocol (IP) addresses from the management server providing the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) service in the same VLAN of the cloud appliances. Under this circumstance, the hosting service provider should use different management servers to manage the cloud appliances in the different VLANs. As the amount of VLANs increases, the amount of required management servers also increases. Consequently, the hosting service provider should spend more money and human resources on maintaining the management servers.
In view of this, an urgent need exists in the art is to provide a solution capable of reducing the number of the management servers required to manage the cloud appliances in the different VLANs to save the money and human resources on maintaining the management servers.